The best of ‘angry weather guy,’ Vol. I

On Sunday morning I published a blog post titled, “Storms moving into Houston today and Monday.”

The post, published at 8 a.m. and written on my day off, received about 30,000 page views. That’s a respectable number for a weekend weather post. It also brought out the haters, or as I like to fondly think of them, “angry weather guy.” Which I’ll get to.

But first let me restate the actual forecast in the blog post, which was based on the usually fine work by the Houston/Galveston office of the National Weather Service. I wrote:

The much-discussed tropical disturbance is moving into Texas today, and it should produce decent rain chances across the region today and on Monday.

As the rainfall accumulation forecast map below indicates, rain is most likely south of Interstate 10, as further to the north high pressure should limit shower activity.

Forecasters believe the most likely outcome today is higher rain chances this morning and early afternoon, with a break later this afternoon and evening, followed by redevelopment of storms tonight and possibly on Monday.

OK, so that was the forecast, which included a rainfall accumulation map showing 1-2 inches of rain along the coast, as much 0.5 to 1 inch of rain south of Interstate 10, and less up north. It looked like this:

Rain accumulation forecast. (Weather Bell)

Now let’s take a look at the actual rainfall totals for Sunday and Monday, shall we?

Rainfall accumulation on Sunday and Monday. (NOAA)

Now call me crazy, but with the challenges of forecasting precipitation along the Gulf Coast, I think there’s a pretty good agreement between the forecast, both text and graphical, and the actual rain event.

The comments, of course, don’t reflect this reality. Instead, in a manifestation of a phenomenon I’ve observed during the last couple of years, if people don’t get rain during the first few hours of a one- or two-day event they automatically assume it’s a bad forecast.

All rain will be south of downtown. Chron is simply using the old look at the radar and make weather prediction trick. For the past several days you could tell this system was moving west and that the rain will stay in the gulf. I’m sure Eric even kws this but for hype purposes they have to make everyone think its going rain rain rain. (yes, because the best way to win regular readers, my ultimate goal, is to continually provide bad information. — eb)

Today IS Monday. And I am sick and tired of the weather people here in Houston getting our hopes up with 60% chance of rain and hardly anyone got any. How can they keep their jobs and be right only 25% of the time? (tough crowd. usually the insult is “how can they keep their jobs and be right only 50 percent of the time.” now it’s only 25 percent. props on knowing your days of the week, though. also, this comment goes to show that sometimes angry weather guy can be angry weather gal. — eb)

The weather in Houston cannot be predicted. Ever. Just more proof. (except that it is every day, with pretty darn good accuracy, too. — eb)

Anyway, thanks for the laughs, angry weather guy. As I have blogged weather more and more intensely over the last couple of years it has amazed me how angry or upset people get about weather forecasting. It’s trying to predict the future, people, and it’s not perfect. Forecasters are generally trying to do their best with imperfect information and imperfect modeling.